Heroes and villains

"Heroism might not be the first virtue you would expect to find in the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But the Beatrix Potter depicted in Linda Lear's authoritative biography was undoubtedly heroic," wrote John Carey in the Sunday Times, reviewing Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. "Dauntless and public-spirited, she pitted herself against a world dominated by incompetent and obstructive men." "Lear does an excellent job in bringing all the various aspects of Potter's life into focus," said Charlotte Moore in the Spectator. "Her analysis of the Tales is heavy-handed ... But she is good at describing the texture of Lakeland life; Beatrix's working relationships with her shepherds [and] her successful campaign to prevent the building of an aeroplane factory at Windermere ... Best of all ... she allows Beatrix's own voice to be heard, and it is, after all, the voice of one of the most interesting Englishwomen of her time."

"No 007, the hero of Richard Powers' suspenseful new novel is a cognitive neurologist," observed Patrick Skene Catling in the Spectator. "Instead of the consumerism, sex and violence of commonplace contemporary entertainment, the drama of The Echo Maker resides in the problem of how to integrate parts of a brain that have accidentally ceased to communicate with each other ... This is a brainy novel." "This is disappointing stuff," grumbled Tim Martin in the Daily Telegraph, "like hearing your favourite garage-rock band doing Eagles covers on Radio 2. Lots of readers will have far preferred Powers before he went commercial ... Happily for him, the book's combination of sentimental hokum with reader-flattering high-cultural sidelights may well shift more copies than his whole back catalogue put together."

"Jonathan Fenby poses yet again the eternal question of political coverage: is it policies that matter, or personalities?" wrote Peter Preston in the Observer, reviewing Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another. "The most dismaying episodes in this account come from unexpectedly callous calculations. Churchill bargains solo with Stalin. Give us Greece and you can have a 50-50 share of influence over Hungary, with 75-25 in Bulgaria. Let's wheel and deal and settle this whole sordid thing in a cigar smoke-filled room." "Fenby gives a vivid picture of the social habits of the leaders," said Allan Massie in the Daily Telegraph. "In our puritanical times, when only bottles of mineral water appear on conference tables, it's interesting to see great strategic decisions taken by men whose alcohol intake would now invite criminal prosecution if they were at the wheel of a car. Nevertheless, these hard-drinking smokers successfully saw off the teetotal, non-smoking Führer. It would be nice to think there was a lesson for us there."